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I-Narration: Revealing Narrator’s Selfhood

Marika Tonyan
Yerevan State University

T he notion that a narrative literary text can be interpreted as an act of communi-cation seems to be firmly established nowadays. The task of constructing a
typology of narrative texts on the basis of this parallelism, one of the most important
tasks of semiotics, has been successfully carried out.

According to the narrative mode – the set of methods that the author of a literary text
uses to relate the plot to the addressee – different types of texts can be distinguished, the
most common being the first- and third-person modes of narration.

The first-person narrative is used as a means to directly communicate the internal –
and otherwise invisible – thoughts of the narrator to the reader.

The third-person narration can be objective and subjective. The former uses a narra-
tor who tells a story without conveying the characters’ thoughts or feelings, and giving
an impartial point of view instead. Besides fiction, this mode of narration, sometimes
described as a “fly on the wall” or “camera lens” approach (since it can only record the
observable actions) is commonly made use of by newspaper articles, biographical docu-
ments, and scientific journals. 

In the third-person subjective narrative mode, also called the “over the shoulder” per-
spective, the narrator, almost always the protagonist, describes only the events perceived
by a character. 

In this article we are going to discuss the correlation between the first- and third-per-
son narrative modes and the semantics of the pronoun “I” as opposed to that of the third-
person pronoun. Jerome David Salinger’s short story For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,
one of the most brilliant short stories in world literature, has served as material for our
analysis since it contains I-narrative and he-narrative alternating with each other, and the
variation of the narrative modes proves to be critical for its poetics and philosophy. 

While it is obvious that the first- and third-person objective narrations differ funda-
mentally, the first-person mode of narration seems close to the third-person subjective
narration, since both relate the subject’s inner thoughts and feelings. However, as we will
see, there is an important difference between these two types of story-telling. As Paul
Ricoeur says, “When the state of consciousness is ascribed to oneself, it is felt, when it
is ascribed to another, it is observed” (Ricoeur 2008:58). Тherefore, even when the sub-
ject’s perception is related, provided that this is done in the third person, it is not felt (as
it would be the case with an I-narrator), it is observed. 

Starting with Émile Benveniste, the first-person pronoun has been characterized as
presenting its referent as a “subject”, thus “bringing out subjectivity in language”: “The
‘subjectivity’ we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to post himself as
“subject”.[...] .‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego’” (Benveniste 1974:287).

Olga Seliverstova introduced a dimension of individualization which is similar to
Benveniste’s approach: “The meaning of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ contains information
that the participant of  the situation is characterized as an individuality, a personality,

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while the features of this individuality remain unrevealed” (Seliverstova 1988:33). The
individualized description of the referent does not present the individual as a member of
a certain class, but as a totality of his/her personal characteristics. In his book “Oneself
as Another”, Ricoeur states: “On the whole, individualization can be characterized as a
process, opposite to the process of classification, which rejects singularities in favour of
a notion” (Ricoeur 2008:45). Logicians and semanticists combine under the general term
of operation of individualization such diverse operations as definite descriptions – “the
first man to walk on the Moon”, “the inventor of printing”, proper names – “Socrates”,
“Paris”, “Moon”, and shifters –“I”, “you”, “this”, “here”, ”now”. Ricoeur suggests that
the problem of personal identity is the point of intersection between two basic meanings.
This notion implies that two things are correlated: “...identity is seen, on the one hand, as
sameness (Latin: idem, German: Gleichheit), on the other hand, as selfhood (Latin: ipse,
German: Selbstheit)” (Ricoeur 2008:145).

We will examine the development of the narrator’s identity in the story For Esme –
with Love and Squalor in terms of the category of selfhood. We will try to show that by
switching from the pronoun “I” to “he”, the author presents the narrator as someone who
has lost his sense of selfhood. 

J.D. Salinger’s short story For Esmé – with Love and Squalor was originally pub-
lished in The New Yorker in 1950, and was included in Salinger’s anthology Nine Stories
two years later. The story was referred to by Salinger’s biographer Paul Alexander as a
“minor masterpiece,” and Time has called it “the warmest and best of the Nine Stories.”

If we look at the sheer facts of this story, it is very simple. According to the mode of
narration, the text can roughly be divided into three parts. The first contains I-narration
in which the narrator is assumed to be writing at the present moment, as if talking to the
reader. In it we are told that the narrator has received an invitation to Esmé’s wedding,
and that after deciding that he cannot go, he makes up his mind to write down some notes
for her and the groom.

The second part also contains I-narration, only this time the narrator is transferred to
a period prior to the narrative time of the first part. The events related are as follows: the
story-teller, then an American soldier, is in a secret training program in England, and
before being sent into combat, he meets a rather extraordinary girl, thirteen-year-old
Esmé and her five-year-old brother Charles. He chats with Esmé about the war, her
deceased parents, and her plans for the future. They part after exchanging addresses, and
Esmé wishes him luck in the war.

The last part is in a third-person narrative mode: some time later, Sergeant X (this is
how the narrator now refers to himself) is recovering from the war; he is close to a nervous
breakdown, and does not seem to be coping with reality. His friend tries to talk him out
of his depression but fails to do that. Only after reading a letter from Esmé, does X feel
pacified; he eventually is able to relax – he falls asleep with a feeling that he will be able
to recuperate.

There are styles of writing in which I-narration and he-narration do not differ significant-
ly as regards the choice of words denoting properties and actions characterizing the subject of
consciousness. There are yet other styles in which there is a most important difference

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between things that are performed by the subject of consciousness and those which are per-
ceived by him/her. The short story under consideration belongs to the latter category.

I-narration is comparable to a dialogue in which the narrator is the addresser/speaker
and the potential reader is the addressee/hearer. This being the case, speech is organized
so that in this or that way there is reference to the main parameters of the act of speech
– the speaker, the hearer, the place and the time of speaking, and the message itself.

In the introductory part, the I-narration is similar to a dialogue between the writer and
the potential reader. Moreover, the narrator does not conceal the fact that he is going to
write something to be read later on. In other words, there is an open device of “metanar-
ration” – narration about narration. Who is the text intended for? First of all, it is
addressed to Esmé, to whom the story is dedicated:

[Esmé]: “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively
for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”

I told her I certainly would, if I could. 
[Esmé]: “…I prefer stories about squalor.”

“About what?” I said, leaning forward. [Esmé]: “Squalor. I’m
extremely interested in squalor. (p.100)

The second addressee is Esmé’s bridegroom: “If my notes should cause the groom,
whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better”. However, these
notes are not intended exclusively for those characters – there exists an extratextual
addressee, namely the reader of the story. 

The next part of the text contains reference to the events that took place six years
before the story was written: 

In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who
took a rather specialized Invasion training course, directed by British
Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we
were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in
the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke
to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he
had any ink he wasn’t using. (p.88)

Similarly to “I”, the pronoun “we” characterizes its referent as an individual, a per-
sonality. It is a well-known fact that “we” is not the plural of “I”:  since the individual is
unique, he/she cannot be pluralized. As John Lyons, says, “we” does not refer to “I” in
the same way as “boys” refer to “boy”, or “cows” refer to “cow”. “We” should be under-
stood as “I plus one or more persons”, and these other people can include or exclude the
hearer (Lyons 1972:293). This pronoun shows that there exists a kind of in-group around
the speaker, and the members of the group are of the speaker’s type. Consequently, the
concept of individualization is preserved, and the resulting tone of narration is intimate. 

In the third part Salinger shifts to he-narration: 

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This is the squalid, or moving part of the story, and the scene changes.
The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons
I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even
the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.

It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after
V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civil-
ian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quar-
tered, even before the armistice. (p.103)

Not only does the third person pronoun replace “I” in this part, but the narrator is
given an obviously anonymous status, and is referred to as “Sergeant X”. The deictic “I”
transforms into anaphoric “he”, and “he” stands for “Sergeant X”. The noun “sergeant”
puts him in a certain class, and “X” deprives him of his individual name.

As mentioned above, individualization is realized not only through the personal pro-
noun “I”, but also by means of proper names. According to Ricouer, “The advantage of
proper names, which are given to people, depends on their further roles – to confirm the
identity as well as the sameness-ipse of these people. […] their role is to denote one indi-
vidual – excluding all the others from the class being analyzed” (Ricoeur 2008:47). So,
by giving the character a sign as a name, Salinger openly declares the writing method of
detachment from the narrator’s ego. Besides, instead of the individualizing pronoun
“we”, he uses the collective noun “people”: the young man is now one of many soldiers,
impersonal figures frustrated by the war: 

But he was a young man who had not come through the war with all his
faculties intact,…. (p.104)

By using the third-person pronoun (instead of “I”), a common noun and the deper-
sonalizing “X” (instead of the proper name), Salinger shows the splitting of the young
man’s identity into someone who is feeling and into another one who is watching the suf-
fering person, as if at a distance. 

The use of the third-person narrative mode in this part is justified by yet another
important circumstance. Only by recounting the situation as an observable one, can the
narrator dwell on the body language of the character, and describe another person’s reac-
tion to it (on body language in the story see Corte 1997:105). In the story’s third part,
Corporal Clay repeatedly draws attention to the symptoms of Sergeant X’s nervous con-
dition while the two are talking:    

Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. “Jesus,” he
said, with spectator’s enthusiasm, “you oughta see your goddam hands.
Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?”

X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail. 
(p.107)

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Thus, the detachment from the personality of the character makes it possible to speak
about the outside signs of his inner condition, only possible in the third-person narrative
mode.

Finally, the last part of the he-narration has several linguistic elements suggesting
return to I-narration, which in its turn signals the possible revival of the young man’s psy-
chological completeness. First, the young man is not “X” any more, because by address-
ing Esmé by her name, he regains his own name – in the world where the girl was called
“Esmé”, the narrator also had a name. Second, by using the second-person pronoun to
address Esmé, the narrator naturally takes up the position of the speaker denoted by the
first person pronoun, which means that he is getting back the ability of referring to him-
self as a personality. And lastly, there is a direct statement that he is regaining spiritual
health, becoming a “man with all his faculties intact”.

To sum up, the alternating techniques in Salinger’s story show the interrelation
between the semantics of personal pronouns, and the poetics of the given literary text.
The egocentric “I” and “we” make the narrator’s personality visible. The use of the third-
person narration demonstrates loss of sense of selfhood. The final sentence, in which the
personal pronoun “you” is employed, prepares return to the individually characterized
narrator.

References:

1. Benveniste, E. (1974) Priroda mestoimeniy. // Obshaya lingvistika. M.: Progress.
2. Corte, B. (1997) Body Language in Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Incorporated.
3. Lyons, J. (1972) Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
4. Ricoeur, P. (2008) Ya-sam kak drugoy. / Tr. by B. Skuratova. M.: Izdatelstvo gumani-

tarnoi literatury.
5. Seliverstova, O. (1988) Mestoimeniya v yazyke i rechi. M.: Nauka.

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